I very much enjoyed what you did there, and have been thinking about it some today.  It seems to me there are a handful of agricultural commodities, corn being probably the paramount one, that have experienced a really unique set of circumstances since the WWII era.  You have the rapid perfecting (OK, still improving, but unprecedented progress compared to the 5,000 years prior) of mechanization, the wide and fast acceptance of things like nitrogen fertilizer, herbicides, and hybrid seed.  Then you have a political and economic landscape which didn't exist before the Industrial Age which builds a demand base far different from anything known before.  Maybe parallels could be drawn to the oil/coal industries, textiles, metals?  Could a person generate charts like that for something that was trading back in the Age of Sail when global markets were in their infancy, but information moved at the speed of a horse?

That's a bit rambling, I am very much intrigued by the history- but just pondering how to interpret the last 40-odd years of corn markets, or 100-200 years of industrial markets, in relation to human behavior and cycles in all of recorded history.  The simple fact that you are thinking about these things puts you ahead of 97% of the population.


 

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